Who killed the netbook? | Hacker News Reader

Who killed the netbook?

itworld.com

37 pointspwg80 comments

I'll tell you the real reason why netbooks are going extinct: because I like them. They're the ideal computing environment for me. And the world is designed in a way that I can never be happy. Sorry, fellow netbook users...

When I first heard about netbooks, my jaw dropped metaphorically: this was exactly the kind of device I had been waiting for all these years: small, light, long battery life, GNU/Linux - and cheapo! Heck, I even had this secret fantasy in which netbooks would finally herald GNU/Linux on the desktop (I know, I should have been suspicious right then).

I'm not a casual user. I'm a hacker, I spend more time in front of my machine then doing anything else (including sleeping). And yet I like being mobile! I'm not a gamer. I don't watch movies on my computer. My laptop is not a life style product, it's a tool, it's the tool, a Swiss army knife if you will. And let's be honest: you may call a netbook underpowered, but computers have been fast enough already a couple of years ago for almost all serious tasks. Sure, if a compile starts taking too long for my taste, I'll run it remotely on a compute server next time: that's what puts the net in netbook!

So I really thought, for once, things went right. I'd never have to spent huge amount of cash on my next laptop again. From now on, it's only going to be netbooks for me. Life is great!

Of course, that couldn't last. Did I cheer too loud? Did I dare smile happily in public? I don't know, but somehow the word must have gotten out: "Pssst! Did you hear? Kleiba seems to be happy!" -- "Oh, no worries, we can change that easily..."

And the next thing I know, tablets are kicking netbooks' asses... I mean: tablets! What the heck? What am I supposed to be doing with them? Oh, oh, I see, I'm supposed to use all the great "apps". Yeah, well, you know what? I don't care about them. How can I write my own apps? Oh, too bad, for that you need a "real" computer (or be into BDSM)...

Sorry for the rant, folks! But are there other fellow hackers on HN who find it ironic that while we are the backbone of the industry, while we are the ones who enable others to use all their beloved tech in the first place, while without us the big companies wouldn't see any dime - that the main stream market doesn't care about us? That we are pushed into a niche, instead of being pulled into the spotlight?

(Nah, I'm only being half serious...)

Reminds me of the gaming industry where the "hardcore" PC gamers continue to get shafted by exclusive releases to consoles and gimmicky motion controls.

100% agree. The netbook is the perfect cheap portable hacking tool. You can certainly get some development done on them (as long as you don't use eclipse as IDE :-). Phones or iPads are generally more expensive and not nearly as suited to that.

That's why I also get a bit sad at all the 'the netbook is dead!' posts. On the other hand, it'll probably remain a niche for a long time. I mean, if you believe the stories here, the phone is dead, e-mail is dead, the web is dead... and so on.

It seems to be common here to forget that things can have a use and make some people very happy without being "the great next mainstream thing".

Cheap, yes, but I'm not sure "perfect" is the right word. Most netbooks are just a bit too underpowered to run a modern IDE comfortably, and at the same time they don't have particularly impressive battery life (3-4 hours of web surfing is typical). An MBA 11" has a bigger screen, is tons faster, and will get you 6+ hours of battery under similar circumstances. Sure it's $1000 versus $350, but are developers looking for a good portable hacking machine that price sensitive?

For a lot of things I feel I don't need to run a modern IDE. Gcc + a text editor does fine, or something light like Qt Designer. This is why I explicitly added "if you don't use eclipse" :-) You have to be a bit creative with resources, if you expect a full high-profile dev machine you're indeed not well-off with a netbook.

And indeed, finding one with decent battery life can be a bit of a challenge.

And yes, $1000 versus $350 matters for a lot of people, we're not all silicon valley rock stars. Also if you, for example, use the device in risky/dirty/etc environments, you'd usually want to settle with something easily replacable.

I think your missing the boat. The reason why netbooks had such a rapid rise and fall is early adopters liked them more than the average user and there is little reason to upgrade quickly. If you have an internet connected phone and a powerful PC adding a netbook or an iPad still has value. However, you can get a fairly powerful laptop for the 400$ so they don't really help people who only need one system.

I feel for you as you have the technological version of my curse. It is a standing joke among my friends that if I like a dish at any restaurant it will be stricken from the menu next time it is revised. Seems the same people also say "Ohhh Steve is happy, let's fix it..."

That said I still love the netbook although I had to step up a little. I bought an ASUS One which was great but still a little under powered (even stuffed a touch screen kit into it)... from there I moved to a Sony TZ and now finally to a Sony Z. I love the compact form factor (though the Z really sits on the edge) but because I am on the road a lot I needed a bit more processing power than a true Netbook provided. I will suggest to anyone though to look for the Sony TZ series units used. Mine is a 390C, 1366x768 screen, SSD, 4 Gig RAM, wonderful keyboard and runs forever on a charge. If I hadn't needed a bit more horsepower I wouldn't have replaced it for a long time. I wish Sony hadn't killed the TZ but then again, perhaps because I liked it.

You probably know that Richard Stallman is currently using such a dream machine: http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.htm... Small, cheap, cannot even run Windows…

Yeah, I know. He also finds it a bit underpowered, but is willing to live with it as long as it is able to run on free software only.

Nobody killed the netbooks. They aren't dead.

http://liliputing.com/2011/06/survey-netbooks-are-just-as-po...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/06/24/0426232/Who-Kill...

That's what I was wandering too. While I didn't have any sources to link, as far as my experience at university and in general here a lot of people own netbooks and as an estimate, at least 1/3 of students had netbooks as opposed to laptops.

I used one (Samsung N130 or something, a bit old) for the first few weeks before I got a new laptop and loved the size and battery life . .

Agreed. After reading this post, I looked on Amazon and saw that a variety of EEE PC and Samsung netbooks are still for sale in the $200-$400 price range. I also found that around 30 million netbooks are expected to be sold in 2011. Not dead.

Given the subject of the post and the amount of detail the author went into, I was disappointed that there was no mention (or links to posts) of any sales numbers. Just the word dead, death, or killed mentioned 12 times.

`Smartphone' is only half the answer to `who killed the netbook?'. `The hype' is the other half.

Perhaps surprisingly to us, the proverbial `average consumer' does not understand performance and ergonomics aspects of hardware very well. To most of them, an measly 7''...10'' screen seems just as good for productivity and ergonomics as a decent 17'' or a tight 15''. They don't realize the storage (be it harddrive or SSD) is much slower than in larger computers, and RAM is underprovisioned. The hype was there, the price was right, and netbooks sold like hot buns.

But one size did not fit all, and now we have some satisfied owners and some dissatisfied ones. The admin at my workplace is very satisfied; a netbook is his ternary computer (after a desktop and yes, an Android smartphone), it delivers just what he needs when he's on the move. But the folks who bought a netbook as their main computer are oft dissatisfied; the hardware simply did not live up to the expectations. Heck, a decent smartphone (say, Nokia N950) is pretty much as beefy as an average netbook.

The netbook rose by the hype, and now is `dying' by it: undergoing severe market shrinkage, to match supply to actual demand for cheap ultraportables, probably as secondary device.

Am I the only 'happy' netbook user out there ?

I'm still using a 2 year old HP netbook and pretty happy with it. It is light enough that I can actually have it in my bag even when I don't explicitly need it, and largely sufficient for any coding or web stuff.

And you can actually work on it. Which isn't true (at least from my point of view) of any smartphone or tablets. The app ecosystem isn't even remotely comparable on that point.

No.

I am also happy with my first-gen Acer Aspire One.

I don't know where the idea that Linux-based netbooks don't have an app ecosystem comes from, but I wish it would go away. It's like apt-get doesn't exist, or something.

Apt-get is great, but it's not an app ecosystem. I suspect getting a commercial app into the debian apt repositories would be near impossible. Getting the user to install a third-party repository, on the other hand, is nearly equivalent to having them just install the software.

Besides the considerations of HOW to get an app into apt-get - what if you want to charge for it? Apt-get simply wasn't designed to distribute paid software and you'd have to implement all the missing pieces yourself (account management, payment processing, license management, in-app purchases/upgrades). Doing this per-app is no better than the current situation in Windows from a developer POV. Adding this functionality to some derivative of apt-get, on the other hand, is HARD - besides the technical challenges, you'd have to overcome legal issues with taking payments in a variety of jurisdictions with different regulations and tax laws.

It may have been hard, but Ubuntu's already done it. The Ubuntu Software Centre contains pay apps.

Ubuntu's software center, built on apt, has support for commercial software sales.

I dare say that the netbook is not dead at all for people who travel a lot. I own an iPad and a very slow (WinXP) netbook myself, but I would prefer the netbook over the iPad for travel any day. At least I have plenty of storage space for my photos on my netbook and I can plug in whatever USB hardware I want.

As I said in another comment, I use rail every day to and from work. For coding, the netbook wins hands down. It runs a bare minimum WinXP setup(i.e. no virus scanner or loads of services to start up), so I get done what I need to. I'd much rather use it for photo processing / writing emails etc. also.

Of course, once I start needing remote connectivity for work, I'll have to use the iPad.. the netbook battery only lasts around 1.5 hours.

I can see how the iPad is a direct competitor to the netbook market, but the MacBook Air? I thought the comparisons were ridiculous at the time, and still do. I have enormous trouble imagining someone actually trying to decide between the two---price, size and specs were in completely different worlds.

Imagine harder. If you were a Mac user -- say you have a big Mac Pro or an iMac -- and you wanted something small and portable as a secondary machine for coffee shop and travel antics then you may well have found yourself considering these netbook things.

Then the 11" Air came out, and turned that "should I get a netbook" into "should I get a netbook which is very cheap but doesn't run my Mac apps or should I pay a bit more and get the smallest Mac ever?"

Voila: someone trying to decide between the two.

If you are primarily a Mac user, why would you ever consider buying a netbook at all unless you are considering switching to PCs in general?

Why does it have to be all or nothing? I don't think for most consumers there is that much economy of scale that their secondary devices would need to be the same.

Because they're so cheap and so many of the netbook use cases fit in just fine with a primarily-Mac environment: no need to switch from your main Mac if you're just adding in a little box that can go on a trip with you, access internet services, and sync some photos from a camera.

Except that the first MacBook Airs were not 11", they were 17", and those were the ones being compared to netbooks (because they were light). A while later came the 13" models, and not until quite some time later did the 11" models come out (at which point it would be safe to say it was a netbook, not competing with netbooks).

EDIT: Wow, I need to have my memory checked. I must have been confused by the $1700 price tag into thinking there was a 17" MacBook Air. I do distinctly remember being baffled by reviewers comparing the first Airs to the EeePC, though, as it seemed to me they weren't even aiming at the same markets.

Says here that the first Airs were 13.3":

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/15/apple-announces-macbook-...

There was never a 17" Macbook Air. The first model was 13".

People are continuing to downvote this even after I corrected my mistake. Let me clarify:

When the first-gen 13.3" MacBook Air first came out, I had just bought an 8.9" EeePC 901. The difference between an 8.9" screen and a 13.3" screen felt enormous---especially given that 7" EeePCs were still being manufactured at the time, and the 10" models were still in the future.

The whole appeal of the EeePC to me (and others I know) was its extreme portability. The guy who sat next to me at work had a 15" Vaio. It was so big it needed a special bag. Because of it, sometimes he just wouldn't bother to bring it to work. Inevitably, sometime during the day he would find something he wanted to do on the computer. With the EeePC, it was so small that I could just slip it into its slipcase, throw it in my bag and take it anywhere, "just in case", even when it was extremely unlikely that I'd end up using it. I was rarely without it.

13.3" is so close to 15" that it hardly makes a difference. It seems unlikely that you would/could just throw it in your bag and take it anywhere. Even if it was light, it was also big. I took it as a lightweight laptop, not a netbook competitor, and in fact that's how Apple seemed to me to have marketed it---it was the reviewers who were comparing it to netbooks. Maybe it was the reviewers who convinced Apple to try to take on the netbook market with the 11", but it seems to me that wasn't Apple's original plan at all.

The "Mac user who wants a netbook" is a small enough market that it probably has no real impact on the decline of netbook sales. More likely it is a combination of other factors discussed.

I'm a mac user with a netbook...

Up until the MBA (with the exception of the 12" Powerbook) there was no Mac ultraportable. Ie: something you can throw in a briefcase and whip out at Starbucks to use on those tiny tables. Netbooks filled that niche, and because of the cheap price a Mac user might not even care that it can't run all their apps.

Right, but again, Mac users are a minority. 15% currently. The number that wants a netbook is probably a small percentage of that 15%. I was arguing against the "Mac users not buying PC netbooks" as being statistically insignificant. Other factors mentioned (smartphones, ipads, cheaper laptops) have to be a much more important factor than a niche audience having an alternative product.

I used a netbook for about a year, got a macbook air and haven't used the netbook since. I agree they aren't directly comparable due to the cost and specs difference, but I wouldn't go back to a traditional netbook again so it definately "killed the netbook" for me.

The MBA proved that your netbook form-factor computer didn't have to suck. You didn't have to compromise (acceptable) performance for form-factor.

I just ordered my first netbook yesterday. The main feature? It's disposable.

My main laptop is a Macbook Pro. It cost €1400. The netbook I ordered cost €136 (used). I have a cheap cell phone because I lose my phone at least once a year. There are situations where I'm uncomfortable dragging along my main expensive laptop because it's major suckage if it get lost / stolen / damaged. The netbook, with its 9.5 hour battery, combined with my mobile broadband (with tethering), makes it fine to throw in the backpack when going camping for the weekend (as I'll be doing next weekend). In a pinch if I need to write a few mails or SSH into a server to check something out, I'm covered. On the other hand, I won't cry very long if the thing gets trashed.

The fact they are so disposable makes them great for travel or university/school. I've used an Eee PC as a secondary computer ever since they came out about 4 years ago. Do I care if it gets stolen or breaks? Not really. With TrueCrypt and Dropbox, my data is safe and I'm only down ~$300 AUD.

If you have to travel in/out of the U.S. or another jurisdiction known for aggressive examination/confiscation, all the more so.

Or, just have what you need on a server, buy a netbook at the destination, wipe it and give it to someone when you depart. (Be mindful of the limitations of particularly but not only SSD wipes. Better to start off use with encryption in place; any sacrificed blocks will be useless without the key.) When the prices are low enough, this can be affordable, if not enjoyable.

I don't have particular secrets to hide, myself, but I don't like the idea of "gubmint" freely rummaging through whatever it will. And when are data are aggregated, we all have secrets. (E.g. insurance coverage or employment denial because of family medical history or crazy Uncle Joey or whatever.)

I've got a Windows desktop, Macbook Pro, iPad 2 and iPhone. Netbooks have always seemed like a frustrating compromise. Keyboard just too small for me to comfortably type on (might as well use my iPad), just enough power to actually work properly for me, and yet another item to carry around.

I was really close to buying one a few times, and prior to my iPad it made sense I think. Now, less so.

I'm in the same boat - except replace the iPad with a netbook. I figured - why get a "big iPhone" when I can have a real computer with an actual keyboard for half the price?

I am sorely tempted to "trade in" the current netbook and Macbook pro for a Sandy Bridge Macbook Air.

Netbooks are painfully slow. I got myself a netbook (Samsung NC10 Plus) recently, and while I don't regret it because I view it as an emergency computer if I should spill water on my laptop, it isn't pleasant to use.

I'm with you on all points. I have one myself that I use solely for coding when I'm commuting to/from work on the train, and for that purpose it works wonderfully. I've had to treat even a new netbook(for the time, anyway) like it was a very old PC... so I kept the setup on it to an absolute minimum. It boots very quickly and I can usually get working in very little time. Once I get back home, all my code is sync'd with my other PC's on Dropbox and I continue from there.

That said, I wouldn't recommend using it as a primary machine for long durations... not without a spare mouse, keyboard or monitor to hook up to the VGA port. I've done that setup in the past and it's worked out for the most part, but without them I don't think I could use it for more than 2 hours.

It depends on the processor. A low-end single-core Intel Atom is okay for light browsing.

But some ultra-portables with dual-core CPU's are much zippier, e.g., the Thinkpad x120e with the dual-core AMD Fusion E350.

For most uses it depends on memory too: both RAM and mass storage. A typical user has a browser, an IM and some other window opened most of the time. A bunch of systray icons, perhaps also antivirus, if MS Windows.

A typical netbook is underprovisioned in RAM and has slow storage to match; pain both when starting up and in case of swapping VM pages. Topped up with a joke of a GPU, likely using up access cycles of system memory instead of having own dedicated RAM.

Less display estate (pixel-wise) means you have to Alt+Tab or scroll around more often, too; sucking up your time.

So no, CPU doesn't have to be the only choke point in a netbook, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law kicks in.

My netbook was originally 1GB so I bought a 2GB stick for dirt cheap, something like $20 or so.

And this may sound painful but on the 10.1" screen I would have 2 windows next to each other, split vertically so each taking up half the screen, and it was fine.

Interesting. My case is perhaps unusual since I never use more than 800Mb of RAM. I am running Linux, a browser and a terminal. So on all my machines, I only have 1Gb installed and no swap.

I did add an SSD but other than boot time, did not get any benefit since everything fits in RAM and there's no swap. So that's why I consider CPU to be the bottleneck for me.

Really, all of them?

I used a Samsung N130 (Single core 1.6GHZ Atom, 2GB RAM) for a few weeks and it was fast enough to do very basic Java development, browsing, SSH, etc. while out at uni.

I can't agree; while I won't deny it's slower and less capable than my main machine, it's very rarely an obstacle in my regular use of it.

Not really.

I have an Acer from their first-gen series that's still perfectly satisfying for development and some browsing. I write a lot of Python code on it, run and test it under Django (sqlite, MySQL and PostgreSQL) and Google App Engine dev_appserver and it works well enough. Its memory has been maxed out at 1.5 GB (newer models can have more) and my most serious problem with it is that the disk is slow (but it's industry-standard sized and can be easily replaced by a faster one (or an SSD). The second one is the screen - 1024x600 is somewhat limiting sometimes (but it has a VGA port and can do dual head).

What are you running on your Samsung? It's hardware should make it a bit zippier than mine.

Like the other guy said, that's more of a software issue. A minimal linux distro with a lightweight WM tends to work well. An easy way to aid the lack of RAM is to use an SD card or USB drive as swap (to save the SSD from overuse). The keyboards on those things, on the other hand, are simply not compatible with my fingers.

Android and Chrome will revive the netbook. They are free (as in beer) OSes, and run with very minimal hardware. As such, devices having one of both OSes will be the OLPC replacement. As the third world has either very old or no computer, those cheap devices will flood the market. Netbook formfactor will be part of them, as desktop work will still be needed.

I'm hoping enough people know that there isn't much space between smartphones, tablets ("there isn't a tablet market, there'a an ipad market") and normal laptops. I'm keeping track of how much my mums netbook gets used now she has an iphone, and the work laptop she often went to anyway.

It's a bit like drugs for Africa. Do we really need to be able to buy things as cheaply as they do? No, $100, even $400 laptops are silly. I hope so at least, I'm quite big and need space between keyboard and screen.

Well, I certainly hope that reports of the netbook's death are in fact reports of the death of the netbook's hype...

I'm another of those who find them almost perfect devices. It gets used for real, serious, mobile computing. Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 on a netbook with a long battery life make a wonderful go-anywhere productivity device and let me work far, far more easily than I could otherwise because it can just slip in the bottom of my bag. I can and do write music on it almost anywhere in a MIDI sequencer. Firefox works well for regular browsing, OpenOffice works well for note taking in meetings. I can touchtype on my netbook with comparable speed and accuracy to any other device, certainly fast enough to take notes live in a presentation. I won't claim it's fast enough for doing any very heavy photography work but it's a very useful portable preview and backing storage device.

Give me a tablet with a card reader and decent storage and I could do the photography as easily on that, I'll concede. Give me a good mobile browser and that's pretty much as good as on the netbook, though from my experience with Android Firefox and Chrome I'm not convinced yet. Music? Maybe, I can see it could be done but I'm not sure the apps are there yet from what I've heard.

The rest though? You want to show me someone typing at an accurate 100WPM on a tablet without an external keyboard? (By which point I'd rather have them integrated and a bit more rugged, personally.) You want to show me someone doing serious software development on a tablet?

Small, light, cheap, compatible. Netbooks are all of these and let me Just Get On With It. Tablets aren't.

For some folks, (like my wife and many of her friends), the netbook is the perfect computer. It's light enough to be taken anywhere and powerful enough to fulfill the daily tasks for the casual user. For her, a touch typist, the keyboard is infinitely more useful than a touch screen on a tablet. With a extra 1GB of DRAM, Windows 7 runs well enough that she can use it for almost all her personal needs sans the very few rare tasks, (encoding media or database reporting), that may require the horsepower of my home workstation.

With the new hardware in the pipeline, I believe there is still a long life in the netbook model to create a very portable computer with a real keyboard that people will find useful and compelling. I'll probably wouldn't be using it as the main development system, but I don't see a problem having a high battery life, Linux/Windows machine that's easy to lug around. For the creator in me, tablets don't cut it.

The problem with netbooks is they are very slow with Windows on them and most of them still cost $500. For most people a tablet would offer a much better experience overall for surfing the web.

But I think we'll start seeing a lot of ARM based slim netbooks/low-end notebooks with quad core 1.5 Ghz Tegra 3 chips that will cost under $250-$300 with either Chrome OS or Android, that will fulfill the netbook's purpose of surfing the web very well for that price. I think a lot of people would still prefer a machine that is half the price of iPad and has a real keyboard, for surfing the web, and that will seem very fast, at least compared to an Atom running under Windows 7.

I didn't read the article, but was he suggesting it was the Macbook Air that killed the netbook? I think that's ridiculous. A macbook air is what $1000-$1400? It wouldn't even be on most people's radar when looking for a cheap mobile computer they can surf the web on.

Are they really that expensive in the U.S.? I expected them to be cheaper than here in Uruguay, where an Atom-based netbook sells from U$ 300 to U$ 500.

And, Windows 7 or XP netbooks offer a very good web surfing experience (both my girlfriend and my mother-in-law are very pleased).

>>> didn't read the article, but was he suggesting it was the Macbook Air that killed the netbook? <<<

I'm sorry if this is rude, but I downvoted you. I did that because you didn't bother to read the article, but you bothered to comment.

It's just isn't that simple. His argument for the MacBook Air is that it's in the same form factor, while having incredible battery life and being more powerful computationally. Plus, throw in OS X and you have a deal. In a way Air is netbook inspired in terms of the form factor, and the it killed the netbook by making the point that you could still pack in impressive features into a form factor that small by conventional standards, while having a decent profit margin.

In the article, the author makes the point that what really killed the netbook was portable computing (in the form of smart phones and tablets) that packed the same punch and was more intuitive, while maintaining a good enough profit margin for hardware manufacturers to stampede in order to get into the segment.

That said, I have a netbook, an Acer Aspire One, and it runs Ubuntu 10.10 with a grin and is quite awesome once you get used to the tiny keyboard...

Besides, I really do think that no one is taking real advantage of modern computing and you can still write Ruby code on Pentium 2 era PC once you flash it and boil it down to the basics. I think that if someone is dedicated then even a dumb terminal is enough to write code, why do you need that new found computational power? This really is an honest question.

I downvoted your post because the second sentence attacks the poster rather than the post. It is impossible to you to know for sure whether someone read an article or not before posting. Such a guess never adds anything to a discussion. It is always possible to address flaws in a post without accusing the author of not reading something.

He didn't guess. nextparadigms admitted that he didn't read the article.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I was attacking him, but I actually didn't mean to.

The author admitted that he hadn't read the post...

P.S. - I'm a she not a he...

Yeah my mistake there, sorry.

I completely agree with the author's argument about smartphones and tablets, but I think @nextparadigms is right about the MacBook Air. It belongs in a completely different market segment, along with $2,000 "ultraportables" from Lenovo and Toshiba. That segment has been there for a long time even before netbooks appeared.

It's definitely possible to pack a real Core 2 or i7 processor, an optical drive, and 10+ hours of battery life in a 11-13 inch form factor with a weight of no more than 3 pounds. It gets pretty damn expensive, though, even without the mandatory Apple mark-up.

Personally, I would urge anyone who has a good enough budget to get a real ultraportable instead of a half-assed Atom netbook. But if somebody is shopping for a $350 netbook, I don't think they'd consider the MacBook Air a serious alternative. If anything, smartphones and tablets are stealing market share from both netbooks and ultraportables.

I think that the author was talking about functionality...

>>> If there was an appetite for easy-to-use, lightweight, entertainment and light computing devices, the netbook was supposed help fulfill that dream. Instead, it's been replaced in functionality by lower priced computers (a version of the MacBook Air became available for $995) having more capacity and better specs than the OLPC—while retaining light weight, high battery power conservation, and SSD devices without a plethora of jacks and an integral DVD drive—and the smartphone and pad/tablet genre. <<<

Being "replaced in functionality" by a superior product that costs at least 3 times as much doesn't make the inferior product "dead" any more than BMW makes Ford "dead". The author makes some good points, but the MacBook Air is a bad example.

Ah yes, you're right.

Thank you for correcting me.

"[The Mackbook Air] wouldn't even be on most people's radar when looking for a cheap mobile computer they can surf the web on."

The article suggests that netbooks have three primary features: lightweight, low price, long battery life. The MB Air nails two of those, and works for consumers that don't mind the extra price. For those who are price sensitive, netbooks have been attacked on the bottom front by tablets and smartphones.

There are netbooks with 9-14 hours of battery life. How does 6 hours of battery life 'nail it' in comparison?

I just wonder what the author thinks "fatuous" means. What on earth is a "fatuous notebook"?

I do keep looking for a good netbook-like solution for recreational coding and writing while traveling. If it can run emacs/gcc/X11 as well as a 1998-era laptop, I'd be satisfied, but I can't quite find anything that's cheap enough for that almost-throw-away use.

What about a used laptop?

They're almost always broken, failing, or have no battery life left (and you can't get replacements). It's much more trouble than it's worth.

One thing about the Linux point: why buy a computer whose major advantage is portability and battery life, then give up a huge chunk of the latter by putting Linux on it?

That's the thing that pissed me off most about my netbook. Windows sucks and I couldn't put Linux on it without its shitty power management cutting a couple of hours off the battery.

That's an unfair generalization, especially if you're in control of the hardware used.

There are some drivers that certainly drain your battery very quickly (I'm looking at you, Broadcom!), but there are other hardware constellations where Linux has a significantly lower power usage than Windows. It's up to the hardware manufacturers to select the right components.

When I first got my Eee PC 1000HA two or three years ago, I immediately noticed that it got far better battery life on Windows - about 4 hours, as opposed to 3 on Ubuntu and Arch Linux. That lead me to just stick with Windows XP for a few years. Things seems to have improved now, though. I installed Slackware 13.37 on it about a week ago, and it gets a full 4 hours:

  david@Fnord ~]$ acpi
  Battery 0: Discharging, 100%, 04:10:47 remaining
  [david@Fnord ~]$ uname -a
  Linux Fnord 2.6.37.6-smp #2 SMP Sat Apr 9 23:39:07 CDT 2011 i686 Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270   @ 1.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

I'd give Linux another shot on the laptop.

I think they are giving the OLPC way too much credit for starting the netbook trend. I remember that when it was introduced, one of the main criticisms was that the industry was already making laptops almost that cheap anyway.

Onn the other side, they aren't giving near enough credit to the iPad, which was pretty much the sole reason for the fall of netbooks. Netbooks were never good products anyway (especially the OLPC), and while they demonstrated a clear demand for mobile computing in a low price range, they were extremely vulnerable for someone else to come along and create a better option for a similar price. This was the iPad.

Look at the chart here: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/netbook-ipad/

Netbooks were already slowing (imho because of just being inferior products) and when the iPad was introduced, it's the last nail in the coffin.

It's dying (is it?) because it's slow and not-so-useable.

Ok, I just say that because a netbook (Gigabyte Q1000C, 2g of RAM, Atom N470) has been my main personal computing platform for some months now, but boy is it painful! The thing even fails to finish moderately heavy compilation tasks (eg. qemu or gcc). Oh, and it's made of subpar components too, the touchpad doesn't handle even vertical scrolling! There's like 2 non-visible areas tappable/touchable to go up and down... And the keyboard randomly decides that it like the key I last pressed and keeps pressing it for me...

That rant passed it must be said that's I'm not a typical user and my wife use her first gen Aspire One like nothing's wrong so maybe it's just me.

I'd say what killed it is that for $200 you can buy a decent used 13" laptop, instead of spending $250-300 on a borderline unusable new 10" netbook.

It's not even just used laptops anymore. I sold computers for four years at Office Depot and saw the rise of Netbooks. It wasn't long after that that low end traditional laptops started hitting the sub $400 price range during sales and clearance and customers had a lot harder time justifying the smaller size and lower specs.

That assumes price is the only selling point. It isn't for me; I like the extra portability of the smaller machine. It goes to places a 13" wouldn't because it fits in the bag more easily.

I'd say the 13" laptop won't kill the 10" netbook at least until it fits in the same space.

I carry mine with me much more than I would carry a 13" laptop.

I disagree with the premise of this article. Netbooks aren't dead. Therefore, no one killed them.

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